The passengers were stunned for all of three seconds. Then they began muttering among themselves in Spanish and Haitian Creole.
“All men on this tour?” Remo asked.
“Who are you?” the driver demanded. Remo sensed the man was suitably outraged and fearful to be sincere. He dragged the driver out of the seat and onto the sidewalk in a flash. “Get out of sight or you’re gonna get killed.”
“Wha’? Wha’ ’bout dem passengers?”
“Dem haffa getta beatin’.” Remo shoved the large Jamaican driver, slamming him through the front doors of a gift shop, where he dropped out of sight, and then he was on the bus.
There was a rattle of machine-gun fire that took out the front windows and Remo lunged for the gunner, pushing the gun into his stomach and into the seat behind him. Then he went down the row snatching weapons and tapping heads. “Guns are not allowed on my bus. No cigarettes, no alcohol, no pornography. Give me that, mister!” He snatched a length of cable from a dark- skinned man in a pink golf shirt, looped it around the man’s neck and pulled it taut. The man’s head bounced on the aisle and rolled toward the rear. A group of four in the rear came to their senses and dived for the rear emergency exit. As soon as they went out, they came flying back inside, bouncing off the ceiling and crumpling onto the seats, lifeless and limp.
“Okay, I think we can all see that there is going to be no government takeovers by this bunch of ill-mannered boys today. If I get some honest answers out of you hoodlums, I’ll go easy on you later. First question— who’s the boss?”
There was a chorus of answers. Even the ones in English were too accented to understand.
“Little help?” Remo asked. Chiun was now standing in the fear entrance.
“Have I not assisted enough? I count four assassinated by me, and just two for you, who are the Reigning Master.”
“I mean translating, Chiun. What the hell are they saying?”
“Muffa Muh Mutha,” repeated one of the attackers. “That is the name.”
“Muffa Muh Mutha?”
“He is star of reggae from Brighton in England.” Remo understood. “Sir Muffa Muh Mutha?”.
“Yes, mon.”
“I see. Is he a part of today’s activities?”
“Yes, mon.”
Remo smiled. “I see!”
Sir Muffa Muh Mutha didn’t take the news well. “Get everybody back to the Mutha-rev,” he ordered. “I’ll personally make the move on the PM.”
“That’s not safe thinking. Sir Mutha.” Sissy Muh was his chief of security and general of his army. She was also his foremost lay at the moment—a smart woman and quite adorably beautiful. She wore her glossy black hair braided down to the small of her back, like an elegant Egyptian princess. Like Muffa, she was from the streets of Brighton, where she grew up being unexceptional in every way, until she dropped out of school and started looking for a cause.
For the young man named Reginald Parkins, the cause became music. Using a personal computer and illegally downloaded music files, he learned to splice together bits of sound, thus creating something entirely original and new. He took on a new name to go with the career—nobody would take Reginald Parkins seriously, but Muffa Muh Mutha sounded like reggae and American street combined.
No matter what anyone said, he was an artist who created music that was new and fresh.
Skirting and dodging copyright-infringement lawsuits around the world, Muffa became a star of the British reggae scene. Jamaica was another story. His first visit, he had been heckled the moment he was off the plane. His concert sold well—but it turned out the tickets had been sold to vehement Muffa-haters. He was booed offstage before he finished performing his first track, “I Knifed the Constable.”
‘Thief! Thief! Thief!” the crowd chanted.
“I’m no thief. I wrote the damn song,” he snarled to an entertainment reporter later on. Being from the British press, the reporter sided with Muffa.
“They claim that a similar song was performed by another reggae star some time ago,” the reporter said.
“Maybe it was—how should I know?” Muffa said. “Let’s face it, there are hundreds of thousands of songs that have been done throughout the years and I can’t know them all, right? But I didn’t steal my songs. The music is my own creation.”
The reporter steered around the subject of the borrowed music samples. It was widely known that one hundred percent of the music used by Muffa was electronically appropriated and altered enough to make it legally “new.” Until Muffa fell out of favor, the subject was out-of-bounds.
Muffa, amazingly, stayed in favor for almost eighteen months. Even more amazingly, he was given a knighthood.
Filling A Quota? asked a prominent British newspaper, which implied that the reggae star had simply been the only potential black candidate in the year’s crop of potential knights. Was Muffa Knighted Because He’s Black? the paper wondered.
Cicilia Garen took a different course in life, joining radical groups without finding a cause worth fighting for. She gained an education in street fighting and changed her name to Sissy Gard. When she was paired up with Muffa, she changed her name to Sissy Muh. Muffa was flattered.
She was trying to take the measure of this man. The man who hired her for the job wanted to know if Muffa had the guts to do what needed doing. “He was humiliated in Jamaica,” she reported. “He’ll do it for the sake of vengeance.”
“Oh, very good!” replied her employer, who sounded like one of those wealthy snits with old British titles.
The British snit had come through with mercenaries and equipment, enough for eight Jamaican tour buses. Within minutes of the start of the battle, the first report of casualties had come in. Strike Force A was gone.
“I don’t know wha’ tah tell ya. One American guy goes charging into the bus before ya guys even starts comin’ out,” reported the shopkeeper who was being paid to watch the situation in front of Jamaica House. “He drags out the driver and goes in, and the windshield goes flyin’ all over from guns. Then, whatchoo know? The American guy comes out again. Everybody be dead on the bus.”
“There were twenty-two men on that bus!”
“Now theh be twenty-two corpses.”
“He must be wrong,” Sissy said.
“Maybe. I’m not taking a chance. The PM’s gotta go. Sis, or this all’s for nothin’.” Muffa looked grim. “I want all them to come to the PM’s house and we’ll take it together for sure.”
“But that means we’ll get none of the other targets. It won’t be enough to take just the PM, Muffa.”
“We’ll take the rest. We’ll just take the PM first. Then we start goin’ door tah door.”
Muffa cut her off when she tried to press her point and Sissy felt a dismal sense of failure. There was a reason the attacks were planned the way they were. Hit the Jamaican government targets quick and all at once. Don’t give them time to muster a defense.
Sir Muffa Muh Mutha’s bus began moving toward the city center and Hope Road, where it would converge with all of Muffa’s attack buses.
“It will work, Sis,” Muffa assured her. “We’ll have a human shield. Once we have the PM, we can strike at them and they won’t strike back.”
Sissy Muh smiled. “Sounds lovely.” But in her heart she had serious doubts.
The first of the buses halted on squeaking brakes before the cordon around Jamaica House, then quickly swerved in a half circle. The side windows dropped open and gunfire exploded from inside, mowing down security soldiers as they ran for cover.
Remo sprinted alongside the bus and slapped at the guns, bending and breaking them. Some of the hands holding them broke, too. A man in a body armor leaped from the door and opened fire, his rounds peppering the side of the bus until Remo turned and ran back to him, removing the gun from his grasp before the man fell dead with a finger-sized hole in his skull.